Irish Management Institute, Sandyford

O’Connor Sutton Cronin were the Consulting Civil / Structural Engineers for the construction of a Conference and Bedroom facility at the Irish Management Institute in Sandyford.

High quality fair-faced white concrete is the primary aesthetic material of the finished building. The white concrete is utilised extensively to form the external elevations of the building. The main entrance atrium and conference area have fair-faced exposed on the interior and exterior. We were able to bring our extensive experience in the use of exposed fair-faced concrete obtained on projects such as the Institute of Technology, Carlow and the National Gallery of Ireland to bear in formulating a very specific specification for the Irish Management Institute project.

In our opinion the only successful method of specifying exposed concrete is to determine an existing sample of the type and quality of concrete required and to successfully describe this with photographs, descriptions and sample panels within the tender documentation.

On the projects which we have been involved with to date, the difficulties have been that suitable samples of the quality of concrete required have not been available and it has been necessary to describe in the specification the various different qualities of the finished concrete from different examples and utilised this into an overall specification.

To date this has been very successful and the quality of the finished concrete being achieved in the Irish Management Institute is of the very highest quality.